tempt
her to eat; how often her hostess turned faint in cooking for her. The
crooked creatures pitied, as well they might, the lovely lady; they
believed that Christ was in her; that the deepest in her was the nature
He had made--His own, and not that which she had gathered to
herself--and thought her own. For the sake of the Christ hidden in her,
her own deepest, best, purest self; that she might be lifted from the
dust-heap of the life she had for herself ruined, into the clear air of
a pure will and the Divine Presence, they counted their best labor most
fitly spent. It is the human we love in each other--and the human is the
Christ. What we do not love is the devilish--no more the human than the
morrow's wormy mass was the manna of God. To be for the Christ in a man,
is the highest love you can give him; for in the unfolding alone of that
Christ can the individuality, the genuine peculiarity of the man, the
man himself, be perfected--the flower of his nature be developed, in its
own distinct loveliness, beauty, splendor, and brought to its idea.

The main channel through which the influences of the gnomes reached the
princess, was their absolute simplicity. They spoke and acted what was
in them. Through this open utterance, their daily, common righteousness
revealed itself--their gentleness, their love of all things living,
their care of each other, their acceptance as the will of God concerning
them of whatever came, their general satisfaction with things as they
were--though it must in regard to some of them have been in the hope
that they would soon pass away, for one of the things Juliet least could
fail to observe was their suffering patience. They always spoke as if
they felt where their words were going--as if they were hearing them
arrive--as if the mind they addressed were a bright silver table on
which they must not set down even the cup of the water of life roughly:
it must make no scratch, no jar, no sound beyond a faint sweet
salutation. Pain had taught them not sensitiveness but delicacy. A
hundred are sensitive for one that is delicate. Sensitiveness is a
miserable, a cheap thing in itself, but invaluable if it be used for the
nurture of delicacy. They refused to receive offense, their care was to
give none. The burning spot in the center of that distorted spine, which
ought to have lifted Ruth up to a lovely woman, but had failed and sunk,
and ever after ached bitterly as if with defeat, had made her